Edwin Olson, Technomancer at the University of Michigan, has summoned this Mecha-Legion because two Central Processing Units work better than one, and 16 work wonders. On conjuring the blight of mankind, Olson explains:

“Compared to a human, a single robot is a terrible searcher and decision maker. When you have a complex task, the only way robots win is if you can get a lot of them to work together.”

Complex tasks, indeed. Now, while they don’t have guns or Mythril #DeathSpikes firing piston-like across their Carbon Fiber flanks, I don’t figure it’d be all that hard to nail some on.

.@BYTES1GHz is a single serving of undigested tech for the unfocused and/or unconcerned. Don’t be disappoint. Like. Enjoy.

According to movies and television it is a scientific fact that Nerds have long been plagued with debilitating social diseases such as acne, braces, limp wrist, four-eyes, and polio. But now the Wizards over at the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington have crafted a method of casting the Sequence Genome spell on a fetus using only plasma extracted from the blood of a mother. With this conjuration the Wizard will roll for perception and may reveal any number of genetic cankers blighting the womb. In the end, of course, it’s up to the parents to decide the fate of their spawn.

In this video a handsome sounding scientists explains the benefits of the new magick:

.@BYTES1GHz is a single serving of undigested tech for the unfocused and/or unconcerned. Don’t be disappoint. Like. Enjoy.

Mars via Wiki Commons

Now that the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity has landed safely on the set of 2000′s #SummerFlop, Red Planet, the Global Nerd Consortium can finally CUT TO:

INT. A CRAMPED AND STERILE SCIENCE LAB - NIGHT

Two mild-mannered molecular Biomancers are hunched over a petri dish. A single bead of sweat runs down ASIAN WIZARD's brow.

BLOND WIZARD

Eureka!

ASIAN WIZARD

At last. We've created a cellular organism that can survive the harsh conditions of Space Planet Mars.

#FutureOfStuff: Well I could be confused on the whole “Survival Of The Fittest” thing, but if you make a lifeform that can survive on Mars, couldn’t it totally kick our asses on Earth too? Let’s just hope they keep that little bug locked up tight till we’re ready to essentially Skeet all over Mars’ barren womb.

.@BYTES1GHz is a single serving of undigested tech for the unfocused and/or unconcerned. Don’t be disappoint. Like. Enjoy.

.@BYTES1GHz is a single serving of undigested tech for the unfocused and/or unconcerned. Don’t be disappoint. Like. Enjoy.

#WhutItDo: The next big thing in annoying baby photos is here. Thankfully, it’s both tasteless and subtly disturbing. A group of Cyber Wizards in Japan have created this truly stunning process for the 3D modeling and printing of super lifelike anatomical models for the benefit of science. But since, like, who cares, and all, they use the technique for making gross little statues of unborn babies. Ew.

#FutureOfStuff: As tech advances we will conceive of increasingly realistic ways to display our larvae to innocent bystanders in the biological #DriveBy that is gestation.

Today’s Tech Brief: Nerds Love Holograms, Invent Ways To Touch Them
#WhutItDo: Well this is awesome: If I could read Japanese, I’d try to summarize what these nerds are
doing with all those electronics and funky boxes and ugly finger accessories. But since I can’t I’ll just say
that it looks like they’re abusing a fairy.

#FutureOfStuff: If you can’t think of potential uses for totally rad interactive holograms, I feel sorry for
you. Go watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or just show this video to a hentai fan and prepare to be
disturbed.

It’s hard to believe there was once a world before The Segway. Back when the only time humans could both stand around and move simultaneously was on an escalator. Now—in no way overestimating the market for such devices—the Robomancers over at Honda have invented something called the UNI-CUB Personal Mobility Device. With promotional language like “For Individuals. For Society. Honda Introduces a new kind of mobility.” [SPOILER ALERT: It's a stool with wheels.]

#FutureOfStuff: Ever seen Wall-E? The future will be indolent.

.@BYTES1GHz is a single serving of undigested tech for the unfocused and/or unconcerned. Don’t be disappoint. Like. Enjoy.

Via Wiki Commons.

@BYTES1GHz is a single serving of undigested tech for the unfocused and/or unconcerned. Don’t be disappoint. Like. Enjoy.

#WhutItDo: JK. No bananas. But the wizards over at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, did find
something super unexpected while recording the neural activity of a pair of monkeys during some wacky
experiment. Apparently they could see what the little buddies were planning to do before they even did it!

#FutureOfStuff: Now, I’m no Brain Wizard, but if you can see something coming, chances are you can
catch it. By reproducing the neural ‘planning’ stage for an action, could you make a subject think it meant to
do something? Whoa.

Yesterday a Kickstarter campaign was launched for a new gaming console called OUYA. An hour ago they passed $3.1M pledged, and bet by the time I finish writing this post they’ll hit $3.3M. It’s still got 28 more days to go, and where else are you going to get a $99 gaming console? Seriously.

What’s up with this thing? OUYA is going to be an Android based console. Which means, basically, apps on your TV. Or, really, an App Store on your TV. The idea is fairly solid. Android is a platform that developers are already familiar with and popular games will surely be ported immediately to test the Cash Climate in a new market. The company has said that all the games must have some sort of freeness to them. Whether that’s just totally free, just a trial version, or pay for premium content, or, like, you know, the last boss is absolutely invincible unless you drop a hundo on that dude. I’d want to create the best game ever but make it so the character actually has to eat and you can only get e-food with real $$$. I’d make so much money.

I feel no shame in simply copy/pasting the tech specs:

Specifications:

• Tegra3 quad-core processor
• 1GB RAM
• 8GB of internal flash storage
• HDMI connection to the TV, with support for up to 1080p HD
• WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
• Bluetooth LE 4.0
• USB 2.0 (one)
• Wireless controller with standard controls (two analog sticks, d-pad, eight action buttons, a system button), a touchpad
• Android 4.0

It needs to be noted that the coolest thing here is how open these OUYA guys are to hackers. The box, designed by Yves Behar of fuseproject, will have standard screws so that anybody can jump in there, and rooting the thing doesn’t void the warranty. It’s an open invitation for developers and hardware hobbyists alike to open up on this thing. As of this moment (3:55pm on Day 2 of this Kickstarter drive) there will be 23,859 OUYA consoles shipping out in March 2013. That’s pretty impressive.

It sort of came out of nowhere but with the recent success of Double Fine, Wastland 2, and Shadowrun (so stoked!!) Returns, and now OUYA, Kickstarter and Gaming are like these soulmates and who the heck knew? This should be the model for everything. Instead of pitching to producers, who get all their info on the consumer from focus groups and failed marketing campaigns, developers can pitch directly to us. We know what consumer want because that’s eff-king us.

Of course, now we have to wait to see if these guys can back it up and deliver products that we actually want as much as we imagined we wanted them. That’s going to be a high high hurdle, dudes. But if this works out it could really do good things for the future of creator/consumer dialogue.

Are you going to grab an OUYA while they’re just $99? What do you think?

Follow Carib Guerra on Twitter @44carib

Photo courtesy of Samsung.

The Samsung Galaxy S III is just the thing to make Apple loyalists question the sanity in their devotion. Apple should do the same.

In 2007, when everyone was running around with RAZR flip phones in one hand and an iPod nano in the other, Apple gave us a sea change. Nobody who has ever bought movie tickets with Fandango, decided on dinner with Yelp, or wasted actual precious chunks of their lives playing brain-hole games like Angry Birds or Temple Run (e.g. me, sadly) can deny that the iPhone changed the way we interact with the world and with each other—by changing our understanding of how we could.

But, yo, people. That was five years ago. That thing caught everybody of guard. We were silly with it; remember? People paid $999.99 for I Am Rich, the arrow-pointing-up-I’m-With-Stupid-shirt for the new millennium. An app called iFart Mobile famously inhaled $10,000 dollars per day in 2008. iFart. iFART! Yes. We were silly, turns out it was all worth it, but we were super silly, y’all.

But now all that stuff that ooh’d and genuinely awed us is standard issue. So many people have smartphones that the New York Times actually thought it was news that a handful of contrarians choose not to join the fun. I wonder if they ran a similar article when that wacky Internet was all the rage. Remember that? I could Google it, but why bother?

What I’m trying to say is that unless the next iPhone is a G.D. spaceship, or transmogrifies the raw materials of the cosmos into Popeye’s famous popcorn shrimp, anything it brings to the table will likely be nothing new.

Will it have maps? Not Google Maps, which now runs offline on the SGS3, and all Android phones (lightning fast!). Will it have crazy good resolution? Likely. Retina? It would behoove them to do us the favor, but the SGS3 has an HD Super AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) screen which, at 4.8” feels a little bulky, but dang if that thing doesn’t look cleaner than Starbucks bathrooms in TriBeCa. Will it have Facebook? Instagram? Will it have…what? A camera? Will it have a phone?

It may be time to face the facts: the rest of the world may have caught up to the iPhone.

Now, I’ll say this, Samsung may have been being real smart and all, but they came super cocky with it. Not a good look, y’all. They seem to think that the coolest thing about the SGS3 is how easy it is to share pictures, music, or just any pseudo-tangible item made of up to 3GB worth of binary. Like, that is cool. Certainly. But it’s not easy. Not unless all your homies also have the SGS3, and even then it involves permissions and settings and really, nobody’s sweating that stuff when it’s already very easy to share electronic data without forcing friends to resent each other cause they had to buy the same phone (if you want to twist our skivvies, stick a USB on that doggie, dawg).

No. The coolest thing about the Samsung Galaxy S III isn’t htat it dims to save power when you look away from the screen, or that it’s got wild facial recognition capabilities, or that you can watch video on a pop-out player while multitasking. No. The coolest thing is TecTiles.

This: little squares about 1” x 1” or so that can be programed to activate whatever stuff on your phone. The example I keep seeing is that you can put one nightstand to activate your alarm just by placing your phone on the thing. But there’re tons of potential uses for these TecTile deals:

• Put one: on the door and tap to open your subway app;
• near the table and tap to open your morning news;
• on your amp and set your phone down to open your guitar tuner;
• bands should have one on the merch table so that fans can FB Like them
• businesses might have one on the counter for a quick 4^2 check in;
• put one on your wallet and tap your pocket to open your camera (HOT!)
• etc. etc.

So, whatever, is the Samsung Galaxy S III going to be an ‘iPhone Killer’? Maybe not, but not for lack of guns. This little buddy is about as good as they get. If you’re looking to buy a phone this summer, it’s a good time to go Samsung. The Galaxy S III has everything you need, and a whole lot of stuff you probably won’t even know what to do with.

At least one dude thinks we could. Some total random known only as BTE-Dan has put together a surprisingly large website detailing (really really detailing) what it would take to Build The Enterprise over the course of 20 years.

As BTE-Dan sees it, all the main technologies we’d need to construct a real life starship are pretty much at hand. Of course it would take scaling them up a bit. Like, way up. Like, to space. But, hey, even if we couldn’t figure out how to build huge ion propulsion engines or a 1.5 gigawatt nuclear reactor or a spinning disk with a diameter taller than the Burj Khalifa—ahem. Tallest building in the world—at least we put our minds to figuring out those limitations.

Aside from being the coolest franchise in television history Star Trek helped to inspire generations of engineers, scientists, inventors, and very cool bloggers to create the world we know today. There are a ton of gadgets that we use now that are as cool, if not cooler, than the stuff Kirk was using in the Original Series. Plus the things we have are often a lot more sensical and useful. See? Not to mention that we’re, like, two hundred years ahead of schedule on this stuff. Bam! Take that, ultra-skeptical 1960′s television writers. We win.

In the FAQ on his website, BTE-Dan, had this to say about it:

“If we want to define the greatness of our civilization mostly based on how we make transfer payments to each other through social programs, well, that sure doesn’t seem too inspiring. We need some other things to get jazzed up by as a civilization – something with a much bigger sweep – something to fire our imaginations. And we need something to inspire more young people to want to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics – the STEM subjects. We need a worthy successor to the Apollo space program – and the Enterprise program can be just that.”

The proposed budget for building this #ActualStarship is $1 trillion, but BTE-Dan figures we can stretch that out at some $50 billion per year. If we can spend $50 billion on wacky stuff like Homeland Security why not just throw in another 50 on building an amazingly radical spaceship? I’m down if you’re down. If we all lived like Luniz and just throw five bucks each on it, that’s already $1.5 billion. If we agree to five a week we’re already in (what I think smart money people mean when they say:) a windfall!

What’s up? Do you think we could build it? Is the idea just a huge crazy waste of brain time? Wouldn’t it be super awesome to have a U.S.S. Enterprise flying around out there? Either way. Check out the site. Obviously my thoughts are, in the words of BTE Dan: “This is super cool.”